The Sand-Man | Page 8

colourless, cold,
and dead. Then you try and try again, and stutter and stammer, whilst
your friends' prosy questions strike like icy winds upon your heart's hot
fire until they extinguish it. But if, like a bold painter, you had first
sketched in a few audacious strokes the outline of the picture you had
in your soul, you would then easily have been able to deepen and
intensify the colours one after the other, until the varied throng of
living figures carried your friends away, and they, like you, saw
themselves in the midst of the scene that had proceeded out of your
own soul.
Strictly speaking, indulgent reader, I must indeed confess to you,
nobody has asked me for the history of young Nathanael; but you are
very well aware that I belong to that remarkable class of authors who,
when they are bearing anything about in their minds in the manner I
have just described, feel as if everybody who comes near them, and
also the whole world to boot, were asking, "Oh! what is it? Oh! do tell
us, my good sir?" Hence I was most powerfully impelled to narrate to
you Nathanael's ominous life. My soul was full of the elements of
wonder and extraordinary peculiarity in it; but, for this very reason, and
because it was necessary in the very beginning to dispose you,
indulgent reader, to bear with what is fantastic--and that is not a little
thing I racked my brain to find a way of commencing the story in a
significant and original manner, calculated to arrest your attention. To
begin with "Once upon a time," the best beginning for a story, seemed

to me too tame; with "In the small country town S--- lived," rather
better, at any rate allowing plenty of room to work up to the climax; or
to plunge at once in medias res, "'Go to the devil!' cried the student
Nathanael, his eyes blazing wildly with rage and fear, when the
weather-glass hawker Giuseppe Coppola"--well, that is what I really
had written, when I thought I detected something of the ridiculous in
Nathanael's wild glance; and the history is anything but laughable. I
could not find any words which seemed fitted to reflect in even the
feeblest degree the brightness of the colours of my mental vision. I
determined not to begin at all. So I pray you, gracious reader, accept
the three letters which my friend Lothair has been so kind as to
communicate to me as the outline of the picture, into which I will
endeavour to introduce more and more colour as I proceed with my
narrative. Perhaps, like a good portrait-painter, I may succeed in
depicting more than one figure in such wise that you will recognise it
as a good likeness without being acquainted with the original, and feel
as if you had very often seen the original with your own bodily eyes.
Perhaps, too, you will then believe that nothing is more wonderful,
nothing more fantastic than real life, and that all that a writer can do is
to present it as a dark reflection from a dim cut mirror.
In order to make the very commencement more intelligible, it is
necessary to add to the letters that, soon after the death of Nathanael's
father, Clara and Lothair, the children of a distant relative, who had
likewise died, leaving them orphans, were taken by Nathanael's mother
into her own house. Clara and Nathanael conceived a warm affection
for each other, against which not the slightest objection in the world
could be urged. When therefore Nathanael left home to prosecute his
studies in G----, they were betrothed. It is from G---- that his last letter
is written, where he is attending the lectures of Spalanzani, the
distinguished Professor of Physics.
I might now proceed comfortably with my narration, did not at this
moment Clara's image rise up so vividly before my eyes that I cannot
turn them away from it, just as I never could when she looked upon me
and smiled so sweetly. Nowhere would she have passed for beautiful
that was the unanimous opinion of all who professed to have any

technical knowledge of beauty. But whilst architects praised the pure
proportions of her figure and form, painters averred that her neck,
shoulders, and bosom were almost too chastely modelled, and yet, on
the other hand, one and all were in love with her glorious Magdalene
hair, and talked a good deal of nonsense about Battoni-like(7)
colouring. One of them, a veritable romanticist, strangely enough
likened her eyes to a lake by Ruisdael,(8) in which is reflected the pure
azure of the cloudless sky, the beauty of woods and flowers, and all the
bright and varied life of a living landscape. Poets and